2 hours ago, Hurlshort said:

Personally I don't want a bunch of games that overstay their welcome. I don't want every game to be a live service that expects you to play for years to come. I want a good 1-4 weeks of entertainment and then I want to move on with my life.

There's a ton of games like that. :)
There are 20.000 games on Steam alone now. That is, 20.000 games released new every single year.
Yeah, most of them are tiny/obscure projects.

Still, I'd argue that's part of the overall issue, at least from a publisher's/studio's end.
Hard to get noticed.
Even harder to stand out from the rest. For everyone involed, big and small.

This isn't strictly about "quality". See my personal take on "elevator pitches" above (Obsidian rarely do as good as with Grounded here, if you ask me).
It's overall a pretty crowded market, similar to music. Everybody can totally pick their lane / personalized playlist... and outside of production values, indies can be fully competitive with bigger games now too.
Doubly so for games that don't "overstay their welcome", as producing something with a smaller scope is more viable on lower budgets.... Meanwhile, live service could be seen as desperate corporate attempt to bypass this increasingly crowded market by trapping a player forever to a single product... That's basically the true "war" going on: It's one of an increasing number of games vs finite player time.

Edited yesterday at 01:06 AM1 day by Sven_

Not news but an approach I find reasonable: https://www.pentadact.com/2026-01-08-15-years-of-indie-dev-in-4-bits-of-advice/

I hate to say this at a time when it would sure be nice if there were more jobs, but I say it to encourage more stable jobs. Staffing up doesn’t really create jobs if it leads to layoffs or closure, and it ****s with a lot of lives along the way.

I think we only get to a healthier industry for workers when more studios are sustainable, and more jobs are stable. And things get unstable very fast as you grow.

The maths of how team size affects your chance of success is brutal:

• Success is making more money than you spent

• Doubling your team size doubles the amount of money you need to make

• But as the numbers go up, vanishingly fewer games make that much money. So it’s not just half the chance of success, it might be a tenth

Admittedly, a large cost sink is the visual assets and VA, while the crowd who can spend several thousands on their hardware are also more likely to have $70 of disposable income, but there are more people with $20.

That is to say, the lower the system requirements, including the storage, the better for the production costs, the gamers, and the environment.

9 hours ago, Hurlshort said:

I don't really understand the gaming industry, I guess. Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed were extremely good games. They told a good story, they were fun to play, and I finished them. Personally I don't want a bunch of games that overstay their welcome. I don't want every game to be a live service that expects you to play for years to come. I want a good 1-4 weeks of entertainment and then I want to move on with my life.

I haven't played Outer Worlds 2, but I can tell you why I stopped playing Avowed. It's not that I didn't like the game or something - I thought the world looked nice, and I like the Pillars setting. Using sword and pistol was cool too. But something in the game didn't feel "organic" to me. It felt more like I was running through a checklist. Groups of monsters in expected places, with expected behavior, with expected paths for how I solve things. Then the expected loot chests with expected loot. At the end of the day, it felt formulaic to me, like so many other new Obsidian games. Sure it makes them less buggy, but also somewhat more boring to play.

Can't really tell you what they would need to do to make it feel less like that to me, though. Maybe I would have liked it more if it were similar in style to PoE1 and 2, though Deadfire already started with the formulaic approach. It just somehow got worse after that? No idea. Maybe not every quest needs to have the same different 4 approaches to solve them. It's ok if there's stories that can't be solved by everyone or only a certain way - as long as it feels like it makes sense.

I should go back and finish Avowed before my Game Pass expires later this year. I tend to find I lose momentum in dark, gloomy zones and such was the case in the second region of the game.

I do agree with the criticism that it's a bit formulaic though - I understand it's not meant to be a game with grand ambitions and multiple ways to tackle every quest, but precious few quests were resolvable with anything but combat, and stealth merely existed as a means to open combat, rather than to bypass it. I get that it's a lot of effort for a mechanic relatively few players even engage with, but it's the only reason I persisted with Cyberpunk, for example.

I didn't buy Avowed/Outer Worlds 2 because I never played much of Outerworlds 1 so I figured I'd end up doing the same with those. They all kinda looked the same to me. Not games I'd spend a lot of time with. I don't need games to last forever ala live service (UGH) but I do want it to be something I'll like enough to have tons of replay factor. EDIT: and that's my issue with a lot of "modern" gaming - either they're online/live etc or more and more world/quest etc design aren't very conducive to wanting to replay. The masses apparently want to be able to play their one save forever and ever so the new norm is constant "new content."

Kotor2/FO:NV and at least initially, POE1 were mainly the games I liked re: Obsidian. For some reason I did kinda like Dungeon Siege 3 (but once and done, mostly), but I was less jaded back then. ;p

They didn't have the luck or game design appeal or whatever else (I guess) of Larian/maybe some others, so not surprising they switched tactics. And ofc now with MS, more general audience appeal notions. I'm glad it seems to so far be working out for them, even if I'm not overly interested in their titles.

Edited 8 hours ago8 hr by LadyCrimson